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Cross Product, chapter 13: Every possible Universe
Monday 16 August 2010 at 08:00 am. by mskala Used tags: crossproduct, fictionFar too early and far too loud, Taylor was hip-checking me in my sleeping bag and saying "Wake up, sleepyhead! It's morning!" I pried my eyelids open and indeed it was. I didn't feel like I had been asleep more than ten minutes or so. She, of course, looked perfectly rested and satisfied. I should have requested lodging in a "non morning people" tent, or better yet convinced the others to help me tie her to the cold steel frame of the telescope support for the night as a sacrifice to the mosquitoes. Make her beg for a place in the tent, and behave herself when and if it was granted. I bet Jeff and Rick weren't awake yet.
But when I came stumbling out into the daylight I found that they were not only up, but gone. A note snagged in the zipper of their tent said that they had gone down the Mountain to take another look at the Godstown subdivision. I was paranoid enough to look inside their tent to make sure they weren't dead in there or something, with the note left by some troublemaking woodland creature, but they were certainly gone.
We started cooking breakfast, and I told Taylor about how Mella had shown up during my watch, and what she had said. Taylor shrugged. "Well, then, everything's perfectly clear, and it's more or less what I was thinking already." "Is it? Tell me how it goes, I'm a bit slow in the morning."
"Well," she began, "You read a lot of sci-fi, right? So you're probably aware of the concept of beings composed of pure energy or thought or whatever, the point being that they don't have physical bodies made of matter. Close your eyes, and imagine you're a creature like that, okay? Immortal, incorporeal, just living in some abstract way forever. But you don't live in a vacuum, except maybe literally. There are other creatures like you, you have a whole society and culture."
"And you're not perfect and godly like the Star Trek energy beings, you're just some ordinary schmoe sort of energy being. So your society has its problems, you people repress each other and commit crimes and stuff just like humans do. Oh, and by the way, you don't have to call yourself a sci-fi energy being, maybe you're a tree spirit or Qualupiluit or whatever or, listen, a 'star person', see where this is heading... humans have had sci-fi longer than we've had science."
"So: your society has crime in it. But what's a crime to a person like that? You can't murder each other because the victim has no body and can't die. You can't rape each other, because again, you don't have the equipment. Theft isn't so meaningful because your world is like software, you copy things instead of moving them. Any kind of crime you can do boils down to something like copyright infringement, or I dunno, crank phone calls. All very abstract."
"But what's an even more interesting question is what you do with criminals. What do you do with criminals?" "Fine them." "That's a problem in the information universe where everything is copyable. Nothing can be scarce enough to be used as money to pay the fines. Try again." "Okay, lock the bad people in jail."
"Right, but how exactly do you confine someone in a universe without walls? What I figure is, you can't build a jail in an abstract thought energy universe, so you have to build a jail in a universe that has walls. Like maybe a certain one I know that contains a little blue planet inhabited by these pink and brown monkey creatures. Oh, and if you're really evil, you give the inmates a satellite TV feed of where they came from so they can watch all the stuff they're missing out on, see their girlfriend mind-fucking someone else, all that sort of thing."
"What about the reality distortions?" Taylor waved her hands in the air. "Thought manipulation. We only see what they want us to see." "In that case, why do they allow us to come here at all?" "Maybe there are limits, like stuff they can't do, or even laws or ethics or something. They must have some kind of rules they follow if they'd go to all that trouble to build a jail in an entire separate universe."
"That's what you figure, huh?" She shook her head. "No, really I figure your hippie friend gave you some kind of mushroom tea earlier, and you hallucinated the whole thing. But the energy being explanation is a whole lot more romantic. Just think of being one of those poor things, rotting in your underground magnetic bottle or whatever, forced to watch television forever until your un-brain leaks out of your non-ears. Exiled from the amazing universe of light and abstract communion that is your birthright, to this barren wasteland of icky dark matter, and through every moment of eternity, knowing exactly what you're missing." She drew herself up, stared down her nose at me, and said sharply, "You may look, but don't you dare touch!"
That reminded me of something. "Taylor," I said, "When we were at Mella's house and you went off with Jeff, what happened? You were looking awfully pleased with yourself when you came back, and you said something about not being intimidated. What was up with that?" "Oh," she said, "You noticed, did you? Well, I'm not really ready to talk about it yet, not with someone like you. It wasn't anything to do with Godstown or the Mountain anyway. I heard Rick telling you he had problems of his own; well, I brought some baggage too." I pressed her to explain that, but she would just laugh, shrug, and say things like "Don't worry, your time will come." I eventually gave up on it.
About the time we were finishing cleaning up from breakfast, Jeff showed up. He said that despite his best efforts, he couldn't find any trace of Godstown, Mella, or anything else except trees. He said that even though he liked the outdoors, he was starting to dislike trees. Upon hearing my story of the night's events, he agreed with Taylor's interepretation: I had been tired and possibly drugged, and had simply dreamed the entire encounter.
But when Rick came back to camp, he took a different view. He said that he'd only seen trees himself - mostly. But at one point as he was walking along the trail he heard a crashing of bushes on the slope above him and looked up to see the last person in the world he expected: his supervisor from the University, the same one who had been unwilling to talk about my sketch of the radio dish. Rick called out, but the man seemed startled and horrified. Rick chased him through the woods for several minutes but eventually lost him.
"There are only two possible interpretations," he told us. "Either that really was my boss I saw, or it wasn't. If it was, then what's he doing here? If not, then what did I see?" We had no answers to that. "I'm going to proceed on the assumption that he was really there. I know there's some evidence that our senses may be unreliable, but it still seems safest to pretend we can believe our eyes. At worst, we're in the hands of some extremely powerful God-like entity that can fool us; in that case it's probably best to play along."
"Now, supposing that was really him. What's he doing here? Well, I figure he'd be here to look at the dishes, same as us. I don't think I told him where they were, but he might know something already. That brings up all kinds of possibilities. I really like Taylor's alien civilization idea, but I don't think it needs to be anything as weird as insubstantial energy ghosts. What if we simply have some highly advanced civilization that plants these dishes here for purposes of their own. I dunno, maybe they're doing long-baseline interferometry between here and Alpha Centauri. Lord knows that's what I'd do if I had interstellar travel. I bet these hills are lousy with UFO sightings. So they come and drop off their dishes, and maybe back for maintenance every so often or to pick up the data tapes or whatever. Maybe they do it in a lot of places on the planet, you said you had lots of pictures of similar dishes on that CD-ROM of yours."
"So, supposing you have a civilization growing up on a planet where there are already a lot of radio telescopes put there by a much more advanced civilization. Well, at the start the less advanced people, that's us, would just ignore them as a meaningless landscape feature. Eventually we might start to write legends about the spiritual significance of these weird structures. Maybe we'd imitate them. Didn't the ancient Celts build stone tables supported by three standing stones? Couldn't that be an imitation of one of these suckers?" He gestured up at the telescope.
"The fun would really start when you get authoritarianism going on, and humans building radio telescopes of our own. As soon as we started understanding what these dishes were and what their presence signified, two things would happen. First, the aliens would start being a whole lot more cautious. Second, the government would start hushing it up. It's kinda hard to take the government seriously if you know that they are but lint in the navels of the Space Brothers. Since these two things complement each other, the aliens might even bend the Prime Directive a little and kind of help us forget that there were ever radio dishes we didn't build."
"What does that have to do with your supervisor being out here in the woods?" "Well, the way I see it, someone would eventually start noticing that there were these dishes that we didn't build. As you can see here this doesn't look like a standard telescope. I know people have built some weird stuff, but I could almost believe that this one's so weird as to not be made by humans. So maybe someone noticed that, and thought, hmm, maybe we can learn something about this, and they told someone else, and whammo, before long you have a secret society of radio astronomers. Every so often they'd sneak out in the woods to take a good look at what the aliens were up to. Maybe eventually we'd learn how to build telescopes like these ourselves." He shook his head. "I wish they'd let me join."
"That's a pretty amusing idea," I said, "but I think it's long on speculation and just barely supported by what we've seen here. Sure, it's marginally less incompatible with what we know about physics, than what Taylor was saying. But I still think it's a bit much to postulate an entire secret UFO astronomy cult." Rick shrugged. "Well, you don't really think that a human being invented Forth, do you? Or, here, let me say that in postfix: FORTH HUMAN INVENTED REALLY YOU THINK? Maybe that's something else we got from the aliens." I still wasn't sure. "I dunno. I've seen ordinary humans do some pretty weird things. I mean, just look at Mella. She could invent Forth, I bet, and she's not even a hacker. In fact, come to think of it, she once told me that she had some friends who thought in postfix anyway." "Sure, but I bet she didn't say her friends were necessarily human."
I didn't have any really good answer to that, and we ended up talking about other, less important things. It wasn't clear what we were supposed to do that day. Rick seemed happy to just keep hanging around the telescopes, staring at them and trying to figure out whether they were changing their pointing direction at all. He'd already established that they weren't swinging around in time with the rotation of the Earth, in order to stay pointed at a particular place in the sky. That was pretty significant because it narrowly limited what kinds of observations they might be making. The rest of us didn't seem to have much to do, not with Godstown vanished into thin air.
I argued in favour of just leaving; clearly, there wasn't anything else we could do here and I had to get some sleep some time. But Taylor wouldn't hear of it. She said that I had promised to Mella that I would help her (Mella) strike a blow for freedom and intelligence, and she (Taylor) wouldn't be a part of my breaking my word. Even though she thought I had hallucinated it. Jeff agreed with her, of course. That left us with little to do except wait and hope Mella would show up again and tell us what to do. We played cards for a couple of hours. Jeff had brought a deck. When I got bored with playing cards, I wandered off down the trail to take a look around.
I had a vague idea of making a map; the trail seemed confusing and inconsistent, and I wanted to figure out why distances seemed to change so frequently. I was about twenty minutes away from the camp, on a part of the slope that I didn't think we'd ever visited before, when I heard the voice in my head.
It was like nothing so much as audio compression artifacts. You know, when you download a song off the Net and someone's tweaked the bit rate down to save a few paltry seconds of transfer time and in the gap between verses or just before the guitar solo or whatever, you can hear the algorithmic compromises overlaid on what's supposed to be silence. Swoopings and swishings and bounces and boings. I don't like compromises.
And as the bushes closed over my head someone said, hey, I don't like compromises either. I turned slowly around, but I could see nothing except the forest. I didn't mean to scare you, said the voice. But why don't you tell me your problems? It seemed like a really good idea.
We talked, I don't know how long, and a whole lot of things seemed to be clearer to me. Rick and Taylor both said that they had emotional baggage of their own that they'd left at home. Reading between the lines, Mella had literally run away from hers. Jeff was hard to read. But I saw that I was the real prisoner myself.
I remembered my dream of the night before of going to work and coming home and I realised that it had been a nightmare. When I made all the sacrifices to learn my skills, I didn't do it just so I could do relational databases and code inspections. One time I thought hackers could rock the whole world to its very foundations. What happened to that?
At every stage of my career it had been compromises, first compromises and then disappointments. Oh, don't do that, don't rock the boat, take the safe path, don't upset anybody, above all don't hurt anyone. I'd been so careful not to hurt anyone that I had been hurting myself without realising it.
Well, things would be different from now on. I wouldn't let them intimidate me or tell me what to do. Nobody would stand in my way! These things were so obvious once they were explained, I couldn't understand why I hadn't figured them out for myself long ago.
I was about halfway back to the camp, eager to tell my companions about my experience, when I realised that I hadn't actually done or seen anything I could tell them. What was I going to say, "I went out in the woods and thought about personal stuff, oh wow?" I needed something more tangible.
I had to return to the place of the voice. I hurried back along the trail, trying to remember where I had rejoined it after stumbling out of the bushes. The place was in an area where the ground level went almost sinusoidal, the path dipping down and up and then back down again a couple times. One of the lows was filled with unusually tall salal, almost up to the level of my neck. I've seldom seen it grow that deep. At the bottom of the dip I turned off the path and pressed through the bushes, their rotten berries slapping me in the face whenever I wasn't careful. I guessed that this must be the place.
But someone was waiting for me, and she didn't speak in the voice I had expected. "Come not." I looked up. The little valley ended inside a horseshoe shaped cliff of mud, and I was standing nearer to the wall than I had realised. Mella was standing up on the edge in a long white dress, my face level with her bare feet. Her face was hard to see, looking up the entire length of her body into the partial darkness, but I had the sudden wild idea that she was wearing a wreath of salal leaves on her head, and a frightened expression on her face that belied the steady low tone of her voice.
"No further," she insisted. "This is a bad place. Just turn around and go back to the camp. Don't look around and don't return." "You once told me that I shouldn't think in terms of good and bad because it'll put me under, uh, the wrong kind of power." It occurred to me that I shouldn't mention the whole star people and cross people thing, in the presence of the entity I had met here before which was presumably still lurking around. Maybe that was secret knowledge Mella had given me before. But her voice remained calm even though her body quivered with something, perhaps impatience. "It was not I who said that, and it's not true in every possible Universe. Stick to thine own. Go away now." I realised that I must have been crazy, or influenced in some way, to ever want to come back here at all, and this was my chance to escape. I took it.
I had almost reached the camp again before I realised that I hadn't been talking to Mella; Mella changed with viewing angle like an iridescent beetle, so I could almost believe there would be more than one of her, but this woman was definitely taller, thinner, with very long legs and a different voice. Thinking back on my clear memory of looking up at her and her proud commands I could hardly believe that I had thought it was Mella back there. Maybe a sister? She never said anything about a sister, but witches always come in three. But that would mean there'd be another one I hadn't met yet, unless I was misunderstanding again, as I almost certainly was. I was about to turn back to look for her, but didn't want to risk the place a third time. The third time's the charm.
Jeff met me on the trail and said I looked frightened, why?, and I told him about the mad voice and the woman who had saved me. "Sounds like my boss," he said. "What, she dresses like a barefoot pagan bride around the EMR office?" "No, well, redneck bride, maybe. Dresses like you around the office, actually, except she carries a sheath knife and finds excuses to use it. She's sort of macho and tough. Chews up co-op students and spits them out; how I survive is a subject for much speculation among my colleagues, but that's another story. But I meant that your imitation literally sounded exactly like my boss, her voice I mean. I don't imagine it means anything, just a throw-away observation. As for your voice, well, you're under a lot of stress, you just need to relax a bit."
He didn't want to talk about it any further because he said he had something of his own he wanted to show me. He took off his watch. "Close your eyes," he said. "Now see if you can count off one minute." "What do you want me to do, go one hippopotamus two hippopotamus?" "Whatever you want that you think will be accurate. Ready? Go!" I counted my heartbeats, guesstimating it was going at about ninety from the way I felt and other times I've measured. After ninety beats I said, "Okay". There was a beep as he pressed the stop button on the watch and handed it to me. "Look at that."
It read "01:53.28". "No way," I said. "Yep. As far as I can tell, either my watch is running at double speed or else our time perception is going half. I've run a bunch of tests and it varies, more than I would expect my perception to vary. I've seen it go as low as one point three, and as high as two point seven times real time. I wouldn't be surprised if that has a lot to do with some of the weird stuff we've been seeing."
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